Uber Accused of Cashing In On Bomb Explosion By Jacking Rates (thesun.co.uk)

After a bomb exploded in Manhattan, leaving 29 injured, people leaving the scene discovered Uber had doubled their fares. An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes The Sun: Traumatized families caught up in the New York bomb blast have accused Uber of cashing in on the tragedy by charging almost double to take them home. Furious passengers have taken to social media to slam the taxi firm in the wake of the blast... Uber reportedly charged between 1.4 and 3 times the standard fare with one city worker saying he had to pay twice as much as usual. Mortgage broker Nick Lalli said: "Just trying to get home from the city and Uber f****** doubled the surge price."
"Demand is off the charts!" the app informed its users, adding "Fares have increased to get more Ubers on the road." Uber soon tweeted that they'd deactivated their surge pricing algorithm for the affected area in Chelsea, "but passengers in other areas of Manhattan said they were still being charged higher than normal fares." One of the affected passengers was Michael Cohen, who is Donald Trump's lawyer, who tweeted that Uber was "taking total advantage of chaos and surcharging passengers 1.4 to 1.8 times." And another Uber user tweeted "I'm disgusted. People are trying to get home safe. Shame on you #DeleteApp."

Comments

This was a market failure

[sjbe]

Supply and demand. Market is efficiently allocating scarce resources. Price increase will increase supply providing consumers with more of the scarce resource. It's a thing of beauty really.

That's the argument that war profiteers make. When there has been an act of terrorism or war that is NOT the time to increase prices to maximize profit. The market wasn't efficiently allocating scarce resources. What happen here was a market failure which is economic self interest resulting in outcomes that are actually negative to society. Uber was maximizing profit and there are times when that is unacceptable behavior.

Re:yawn

[PopeRatzo]

Repeat after me: Uber is NOT run by the government... that's both what makes it good... AND what leads to scenarios like this. You can't have the good (low fares, clean cars, drivers that give a shit) without allowing them to work with the free market (supply / demand).

That's such horseshit. Imagine there was a simple injection that costs $5 and cures cancer. However, if you have cancer, the drug costs $100,000.

You really have to be willing to accept monstrous immorality if you really want a "free market". And the funny part is, nobody really wants a free market. Not really. Even if such a thing was possible. Which it's not.